Bad project planning (or how to burn other people’s money)

Yesterday I had a chance to listen to very interesting conversation during one workshop. Let me describe what was going on. In little conference room there were like 15 people from 10 different companies. What put all together is tool(s) they are using for their projects (in a meaning of doing something, not managing project, to be more precise, it is tool for big data conversion). Now two of them started to argue. Source was statement of one of them that they manage to finish project withing weeks and the other was claiming that very similar if not same project took them almost a year.

As two of them was not going in direction of any agreement bunch of us asked about more information about projects. Really, it was almost the same but somehow one finished it completely in two months, spending only one sixth time of other team. Teams were more/less similar.

There is one crucial difference. First team spent three weeks just preparing, collecting information, talking with customer and other started project after only two interviews and getting answers to some generic questions.

We finished without saying out loud what we all agreed. Customer lost almost 10 months due to extremely poor and bad project preparation (no preparation at all if you like) but project company also lost 10 month. They burned extreme amount of time. Someone paid that. Customer is probably not aware of fact that they could have project done in a matter of weeks. Project vendor guys probably are aware of that but we can only hope they will teach something from that. I don’t think so. I will look closer to them in future. I got some strange feeling about their future. Will keep you informed…